Re: non-free and users?

[John Lines <john@paladin.demon.co.uk>]

> This mean that efforts should be concentrated on creating free 
> replacements. Those who really need non-free will probably not choose 
> Debian anyway. Other distributions (like Suse, Red Hat) provide a lot of 
> non-free already intergrated in their distributions.
> 

For an organisation concerned with licence compliance this "integration" is NOT
an advantage. If you read the side of a RedHat boxed set it says words to the
effect of "the software in this distribution has lots of different licences,
you need to read them all to know if you are compliant"

Debian makes a set of useful assertions about the licences in main so that a
system manager can focus on actually using the software, and individual 
packages
from non-free are available if required (but they will have to read the licence
to decide if their intended use is permitted)

I see this as a big advantage for Debian.

John